Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.) this week announced her campaign for president in 2020, becoming the second Senate Armed Services Committee member and the third female lawmaker currently on Capitol Hill to announce a bid.
Gillibrand, who joined the Senate in 2009, has long been considered a potential Democratic candidate for president. On Tuesday she revealed she had launched an exploratory committee to run for U.S. president in 2020.
In the 115th Congress, Gillibrand served as ranking member of the Senate Armed Services (SASC) subcommittee on personnel, and also served as a member of the cybersecurity subcommittee. She will remain on SASC for the 116th Congress.
Gillibrand’s policy position on nuclear weapons, insofar as she has one, is mainstream Democratic. She supports arms control treaties with Russia that the Donald Trump administration has spurned, and she opposes the administration’s plan to build a low-yield version of the W76 submarine-launched ballistic-missile warhead.
In December, Gillibrand was among the lawmakers who wrote to President Trump in opposition to his administration’s decision to pull out of the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty.
Gillibrand is set to serve in the Senate through 2024, after winning re-election in the 2018 midterms.
Fellow SASC member Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) has also created an exploratory committee for the 2020 race, and combat veteran Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (D-Hawaii), who served on the House Armed Services Committee (HASC) in the 115th Congress, also declared this week she will run.
Warren has spoken the most of the three on nuclear arms issues, including from the dais during public hearings of the committee’s strategic forces subcommittee, which sets policy and funding limits for the National Nuclear Security Administration in the annual National Defense Authorization Act.
Warren has already released a three-point nuclear policy plan that conforms to Democratic bullet points that Rep. Adam Smith (D-Wash.), chair of the House Armed Services Committee, also supports: no low-yield weapons; sustaining legacy arms control treaties, including extending the New START treaty capping deployed warheads into 2026; and a law barring the U.S. from a nuclear first strike.
Gabbard has staked out fewer nuclear talking points, though she has supported the multilateral Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action: the Iran nuclear deal the United States has ceased supporting under President Trump. The deal lifted U.S. economic sanctions on Iran, in exchange for curtailing the Islamic Republic’s ability to create its own fissile materials.
Gabbard’s office did not reply to a request for comment on her position this week.
